MOSCOW (Agencies) -- The United States has already made up its mind to deploy its planned missile defense system in Europe and will turn down a Russian offer to share a radar station in Azerbaijan, Russia's top general said on Thursday, Reuters reported.

"In my view ... the question of placing elements of the missile defense system in Europe has already been decided by Washington," chief of the general staff General Yuri Baluyevsky told a news conference. "The initiative put forward by Russia will not receive a positive response from the current U.S. administration," he said. President Vladimir Putin suggested this month that a U.S. missile defense system could use a radar station in Azerbaijan to remove the need to site parts of a missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic, that Moscow sees as a threat. Putin and U.S. President George W. Bush are expected to discuss the issue early next month at a meeting in Maine in the United States. ----------Czechs remain opposed to U.S. radar plans: poll Most Czechs remain opposed to sitting a radar in their country as part of a U.S. missile defense shield, according to a poll taken after President Bush's visit this month, AFP reported. Some 64 percent are opposed to the tracking radar, according to the poll by the Facto Invenio institute for the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs. If the radar were integrated in NATO defense plans, that opposition would fall to 55 percent, it added. The figures are broadly in line with polls carried out over the previous months, suggesting Bush's brief stopover in Prague at the start of June as part of a six nation European tour had no real impact on skeptical Czechs. Negotiations between Prague and Washington are due to resume within the coming weeks following a first round of talks at the start of May. Czech lawmakers are likely to vote on whether to accept the U.S. radar at the start of 2008 although President Vaclav Klaus recently backed holding a national referendum on the issue, an idea strongly supported by the left-wing opposition